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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29389476">25 Years Ago, You Ghosted Me</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/odd_izzy/pseuds/odd_izzy'>odd_izzy</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Rose Lives AUs [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Julie and The Phantoms (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Equally valid, Gen, Julie's Mom Lives au, Just the start of Julie and the Phantoms, Or just didn't remember her name, Rose Lives AU, Rose is very no-nonsense, She can deal with her daughter being haunted and then make dinner, She has time, but Rose is still alive, for the people who don't know Julie's Mom and Rose from the opening scene are the same character, so Julie has totally different problems</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 08:13:50</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,771</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29389476</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/odd_izzy/pseuds/odd_izzy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It's Julie and the Phantoms, but not as you know it - Julie's mom, dead a year before the start of the show, is alive. This means Julie is just a talented young musician who happens to come across a CD when her mum decides that it's time to organise the studio. And the three ghosts that appear when she plays the CD - well, her mom might just recognise them as the boys she met the night they died.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Julie Molina &amp; Julie Molina's Mother</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Rose Lives AUs [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2158923</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>37</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>25 Years Ago, You Ghosted Me</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/knitsessed/gifts">juliathephantom (knitsessed)</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Totally new fandom to be writing in for me, which you can thank the brilliant and lovely juliathephantom for. She also beta read this for me, so you can also thank her for not having to read 'mum' instead of 'mom' every single time it appeared, since I apparently cannot turn my brain off British English. This one also goes out to my dad, who watched every episode of the show with me and now keeps bringing up, unprompted, how talented he thinks Charlie Gillespie is.<br/>If you're a JATP fan who just found this story and is new to me, I've also written a small handful of DC and Marvel stories you might like to check out if that's up your street. If you're one of my subscribers from my DC and Marvel stuff, Julie and the Phantoms is on Netflix and fantastic if you haven't seen it, and if you have seen it, isn't it great that we have something else in common!<br/>Julie's mum/mom doesn't have any show characterisation beyond her appearance 25 years earlier, so she cannot be OOC, but Julie is possibly quite OOC because I wrote her the way I thought she would be if she had never gone through her mother's death.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>25 Years Ago, You Ghosted Me</strong>
</p><p>Julie’s mom had gotten really into home organisation after seeing some new show on Netflix, and she had been a whirlwind through their entire house, including forcing Julie and Carlos to do their own rooms under her careful supervision. And, after she was done cajoling their dad into storing his photography equipment together in matching labelled boxes, there was only one part of the house left – the studio. </p><p>The studio was the room that everyone, including Rose, had been dreading the most. It had literally never been organised, and there was still some stuff around somewhere that had been there when they moved in. Whenever Ray had suggested sorting it all out in the past, Rose had just said that everything in there added to the creative energy of the room. But she had made him put all of his taller tripods into a wall unit meant to hold brooms and mops, so like it or not, she was going to have to finally figure out what all the junk stashed around the room was.</p><p>Or Julie was, since Julie had gone to an open mic night with Flynn without telling her parents, so she was grounded and Rose saw the perfect way to get out of having to spend hours rooting around the multiple-decade-old trash bags that she thought might be up the stairs. Ray and Rose were very supportive of Julie performing her music publicly, and they would have given her permission to go to the open mic if she’d asked, since it wasn’t on a school night, but the problem was that they would have wanted to go, too. Julie hadn’t found the words yet to tell her hyper-supportive parents that she really appreciated that they wanted her to succeed as a musician but that she sometimes wanted to perform in public without them there in the front row grinning and giving her four thumbs ups.</p><p>So, since she had lied and said that she was just going to be at Flynn’s house watching a movie, and she couldn’t come up with a good answer for why they had had to see her killing it playing and singing her new song on the professional Instagram that Flynn ran for her instead of in person (thanks for that, Flynn), she was now discovering what happened to plastic bags if you didn’t touch them for 20 years.</p><p>There were some pretty cool clothes in these bags – they all looked like boys’ clothes, and the sleeveless shirts with band logos said ‘teenage boy clothes’ to Julie. She’d also found a box full of stuff that she thought might actually be her mom’s from when she was younger, like some old clearly homemade band CDs. None of the bands were ones her mom had been in – that was the first thing she checked – but it seemed like the kind of stuff Julie’s mom was into. And Julie knew that her mom had met some great bands when they were still up-and-comers from when she worked at the legendary music venue The Orpheum. Julie hadn’t put on any music to work to – the new song that she’d performed the other night was still rattling around in her head – but she was going to be there a while so she may as well put one on. Her mom’s taste in music was usually pretty good.</p><p>There were quite a few CDs, so Julie picked the one that had just been left lying on the floor instead of in the box.  She liked the name too – Sunset Curve. She had also noticed a t-shirt that had ‘Sunset Curve’ across the front, the same logo as the CD, so she figured her mom had been a proper fan of this band if she had bought their shirt. It only took a minute to turn the CD player on, and then the first track started blasting from the speakers.</p><p>Julie was just starting to get into the song, which was a pretty great bop for a rock song from a 90s band she’d never heard of, when she suddenly heard progressively louder screams that heralded the arrival of three boys who just appeared out of thin air in the middle of the room.</p><p>Naturally, Julie screamed for a while, remembered that she had legs that could get her out of there, and sprinted down the path back to the house. Which, of course, is where she ran directly into her parents and Carlos coming back from his game.</p><p>After Julie told them that she saw ghosts, her dad looked concerned in a way that suggested he was thinking more about treatment for mental disorders than the existence of the supernatural, but her mom got the same look on her face as she had when Julie came to her crying about Carrie telling her and Flynn that they weren’t her friends anymore. She rolled up her sleeves, went into the house briefly, and emerged with the decorative wall cross clenched in one hand.</p><p>“Stay behind me, mija. Any ghosts that think they can mess with my daughter in my studio have another think coming.”</p><p>Dad decided to just leave them to it and herded Carlos inside, saying something about how if they took too long with their exorcism he would be forced to start on dinner. That was no idle threat, since when a 7 day reunion concert tour for Rose and the Petals meant he was in charge of cooking, they had spaghetti for dinner the first night and leftover spaghetti for the next 4, until Tia Victoria came over to make sure they hadn’t wasted away and nearly fainted in shock at their week’s menu. Carlos’ love for her arroz con pollo didn’t give him much incentive to lie.</p><p>They entered the studio very cautiously, Julie’s mom holding the cross and standing with her back to the door like a cops with guns do on TV, and found it empty of ghosts. Julie looked all over the studio, and her mom did the same, but there was no sign of the three boys.</p><p>“Okay, mija, I think you and I must have managed to scare them off,” her mom said with complete sincerity. It was really great to have a mom who never, even when she was scared of the monster under the bed when she was little, acted like she didn’t believe her. “I’m going to go and make dinner, but scream if they come back and I’ll come running. And take this, just to be safe,” she said, handing Julie the cross.</p><p>Before she could even leave the studio, though, the ghosts suddenly reappeared. Julie and her mom both screamed, the ghosts screamed, and Julie tried to use the cross and just ended up with it and her hand going straight through one of the ghosts’ chest.</p><p>Once they were done screaming, her mom’s eyes widened. “Wait, I recognise you guys! Sunset Curve!”</p><p>“Tell your friends,” one of them said with a grin and finger guns, until one of the others elbowed him.</p><p>“I met you guys the night you died! At the Orpheum? You were supposed to play that night, and you had a killer soundcheck and then left and just didn’t come back. My boss was going crazy trying to find out where you were, and Bobby was freaking out, and then we heard the ambulances. We had to cancel the show that night, there wasn’t enough time to find another act.”</p><p>Julie had wide eyes looking between her mom and the band who looked a little bit older than her who had apparently died back when her mom worked at the Orpheum, which was before Julie was born.</p><p>They were all squinting and tilting their heads to see if they could identify this person was who claimed to have met them on the day that was, for them, about an hour ago. Eventually, one of them looked shocked. “Wait, Rose? The cute waitress? We gave you a shirt and Bobby blew off getting hot dogs to hit on you?”</p><p>“Wow, thinking she was hot saved his life,” one of them muttered, again getting elbowed.</p><p>“Yeah, that’s me. How the hell are you here, in my studio and terrifying my daughter? You died decades ago!”</p><p>“Decades? No no no, after we floated up out of the ambulances, we were in this weird dark room where Alex cried, but it was only for like an hour. You only look a little bit older, really, so it can’t be that long. It can’t.”</p><p>Julie spoke up for the first time. “She’s right. I looked you guys up. Sunset Curve, a Hollywood Tragedy. You died in 1995. It’s 2020.”</p><p>“We’ve been dead for 25 years?”</p><p>Julie’s mom sighed. “I’m really sorry about what happened to you guys. You were really great, and dying right before you were about to play a show at the Orpheum was really tragic. But right now, I have to go and make dinner for my family, so now that we’ve figured out that you’re not the kind of ghosts who would do anything to hurt my daughter, I’m going to leave you in her capable hands.” Seeing that Julie was about to protest, she continued. “Julie, honey, these boys don’t know about any music from after 1995, I’m sure you can enlighten them. And you can tell them all about their friend Bobby, who you know as Mr Wilson, Carrie’s dad, and whatever else you think might be useful for them to know about the last 25 years that you can Google.”</p><p>“Mom, you had one conversation with these guys, 25 years ago! You really think that you know them well enough to decide that they aren’t dangerous? They’re ghosts!”</p><p>“Well, it seems like they’re the kind of ghosts who can’t touch anything, so they couldn’t hurt you even if they wanted to. And I know that they lived for music, mija, just like you do, so you have plenty in common. When you’re showing them some of the best music written in the last 25 years, why don’t you start with some of yours, hey?”</p><p>Rose walked back to the house, somehow knowing that the ghosts of the musicians she had met 25 years ago, and then helped Bobby through the grief of losing, would be good friends for her daughter. And when she heard the piano playing the opening of the song that she had written for Julie, ‘Wake Up’, just a few minutes later while she was peeling potatoes, she smiled. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy this story, and if you do, leave me a comment to let me know. It really does mean the world. Unless you're mean, in which case I will be sad.<br/>This is the first in a whole little series of 'Rose Lives' aus that I'm writing, which will all have slightly difference premises and concepts too them. So if you liked this one, subscribe to the series (my first series! Exciting!) and I'll be posting the next one whenever I finish it, hopefully in about a week. If you really liked this one, though, and are devastated that this is just a oneshot, let me know - if there is basically any demand for it at all, I will write the entire alternate season one story following on from this!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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